American Airlines’ flight attendants are asking their employer to block access to pornographic websites from its new in-air Internet service, as they are concerned about abuses of the system by randy passengers.
From time to time this has already been an issue, say flight attendants, with passengers that have printed or pre-recorded video matter. But opening up the skies to the Internet obviously presents a far wider opportunity for airborne porn: Now you don’t have to plan ahead to bring your adult material on the plane, it’s right there whenever you, ahem, need it.
Given that people are packed onto planes literally elbow to elbow, it’s often hard not to at least glance at the laptop screen of the person sitting next to you. But airlines have not banned people from reading pornographic magazines or watching their own DVDs on flights. And it’s just as easy for someone to view a DVD of an adult video on a laptop or flip through Hustler as it is to surf porn Web sites.
The truth is that it hasn’t been a major problem on flights thus far. In fact, American Airline’s spokesman Tim Smith told Bloomberg that the “vast majority” of customers already use good judgment in what’s appropriate to look at while flying versus what’s not.
The issue now becomes whether installing filters is a prudent idea, as it opens up questions of censorship and “how far” is OK for the company to block. Is it OK to shop for bikinis in the air? Read about disturbing medical conditions? It’s the same kind of issues that have plagued libraries and other keepers of public Internet access terminals, only you can’t simply ask someone to leave the building when you’re at 30,000 feet.
Right now things work on a case by case basis and at the discretion of the flight attendents, and that would probably be fine going forward. But flight attendants are not out of line asking management to ward off problems before they start, if for no other reason than to avoid uncomfortable situations with passengers. Potential legal situations could also arise from passengers who felt harassed by exposure to inappropriate images being viewed by other passengers.
